In the conventional information management system, management of time, management of the number of items sold and work of sticking the labels to the commodities in order to manage the freshness of commodities and reflect it to sales conditions were conducted manually. In general, in stores and supermarkets, commodities are typically provided with supplementary information such as the amount of discount according to the freshness of commodities. For example, the price of the commodities are reduced based on the time elapsed since the manufacture of an eatable commodity. In such a case, it is necessary to manually stick labels having information such as discounts written thereon to commodities.
When sticking the labels, a clerk visually discriminates the commodities, and judges information such as manufacturing date. If there are faults such as mistakes in information reading, forgetting sticking, or mistakes in sticking, therefore, then commodities which are old and degraded in commodity value are in some cases exhibited in the shop as they are without a new label.
In order to eliminate such mistakes, therefore, there is a technique of managing time zones of discount as described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 63-188298, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 5-54211, and Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 8-329350.
As a matter of course, the work of manually sticking labels needs quickness, accuracy, and experience. The store is more crowded in some time zones than in other time zones. Therefore, even if the clerk is well experienced, the work itself is interfered with. Thus, the work of label sticking is complicated.
Furthermore, in conventional information management systems, information is managed by a POS (Point of Sales) system, as described in the aforementioned Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publications. Therefore, mistakes in data processing arising due to human error are reduced. If there are discounts or the like on commodities in a salesroom having commodity shelves arranged therein, therefore, their guidance must be conducted manually. Eventually, this results in a problem that a great deal of human labor is needed for the commodity management.
An object of the present invention is to provide an information management system capable of implementing all commodity management in a store inclusive of commodity management in its salesroom without requiring human hands, in order to eliminate the above described problems of the conventional technique.